Karl Lagerfeld, the German-born fashion designer who is the subject of this year’s Met Gala, liked to court controversy, his achievements on the runway often outshone by offensive blunders and tone-deaf remarks.
His missteps could be monumental — in a literal sense. Consider the 28-foot-high “iceberg” that hovered imposingly over his fall 2010 ready-to-wear show. The set piece, sculpted from 240 tons of snow and ice reportedly sheared off a glacier in Sweden, was intended as a comment on global warming. But the gesture missed the mark, as it took six days and a continuously maintained temperature of 25 degrees to ensure that the ice blocks would arrive on his runway intact — delivered, of course, via 15 tractor-trailers.
As vividly inscribed on fashion’s consciousness was his spring 2015 Chanel show in Paris, staged as a feminist protest. Set as a crowd scene inside the Grand Palais, it featured a megaphone-hoisting Cara Delevingne leading a phalanx of models shouting for freedom, some waving placards that read “History Is Her Story” and “Ladies First.” The stunt raised eyebrows, decried for trivializing an urgent political movement.
Mr. Lagerfeld may well have shrugged. “Everything I say is a joke,” he once claimed.
But the joke seemed to be on the designer when, in 1994, he sent Claudia Schiffer down the runway in a Chanel dress embroidered with a sacred Muslim text, igniting an international controversy. Mr. Lagerfeld, who said at the time that he had no idea what the text meant, issued a rare apology.
He had previously drawn inspiration from hip-hop and rap, taking bling to the runway, festooning the models in Chanel’s fall 1991 show in hefty gold chains. Critics alleged cultural appropriation (though that term hadn’t yet become the buzzword that it is today).
There was no apology then. “Rappers tell the truth,” Mr. Lagerfeld said after the show. “That’s what’s needed now.” A few years later, the designer, who had…
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